Psychoactive Herbs
Integrating Into Psychotherapy
- Spinella, Marcello
- Egli, Dan
Book review of Concise Handbook of Psychoactive Herbs: Medicinal Herbs for Treating Psychological and Neurological Problems (see record 2005–03204–000). The integration of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy is an increasingly expanding field. Many patients seen in psychotherapy have disorders severe enough to warrant concomitant pharmacotherapeutic interventions with traditional psychotropic medications (e.g., antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers). In addition, many patients openly (and often secretly) also make use of complementary and alternative medicine. Clients often do this instead of taking traditional medicines or in addition to traditional medicines or psychotropics. The Concise Handbook of Psychoactive Herbs: Medicinal Herbs for Treating Psychological and Neurological Problems is designed to help practitioners better understand the various psychoactive herbs as they relate to use in the primary psychological and psychiatric disorders. In the handbook, Spinella focuses on eight primary areas of herbs: stimulants, cognition-enhancing herbs, sedatives and antianxiety herbs, mental illness (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and psychosis) treatments, painkillers, hallucinogens, cannabis, and addictive herbs. In this sense, the handbook parallels most of the major pharmacology texts, which focus on primary drug classes and/or primary diagnostic categories. The author starts out the handbook with a basic review of how the brain and drugs work. He reminds the reader that herbals contain active drugs and, as such, cannot be assumed to be side-effect free or even free of potentially serious adverse effects. He reviews basic pharmacokinetics (how the body affects drugs) and pharmacodynamics (how drugs affect the body) before launching into his overview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)